5 Fantastic WordPress Plugins You May Not Know About

If you’re a blogger, you know that one of the beauties of WordPress is the sheer number of available plugins. There are the "old standbys" that many blogs use, such as WP Super Cache and All In One SEO Pack. But are you familiar with some of the lesser-known gems? Here are five WordPress plugins used on 40Tech.com, that may be new to you if you have a blog.

Do you ever tweak the layout of your site? If you modify your site’s stylesheet, repeat visitors may not see it, due to caching issues on their end. As this plugin’s description explains, CSS Cache Buster "does one very simple but very powerful thing: it ensures that your WordPress blog delivers the very latest version of your CSS stylesheet to your visitors, no matter how often or how rarely your edit for CSS . . . Technically, this plugin automatically appends a last-modified date/timestamp to the end of your stylesheet url. And since this feature is applied as a filter, you don’t have to touch your theme files. It just works."

WPtouch iPhone Theme is a plugin which will may make your site display a specially formatted mobile theme to those who visit using anApple iPhone or iPod touch, Google Android phone, or other touch-based smartphone. The screenshots below should give you an idea as to how a site looks with this plugin, although several options, such as colors and icons, are customizable.

Login Lockdown gives your site some extra security, by restricting the number of login attempts from a given IP range. After a specified number of failed attempts, login is disabled for any further attempts from that IP range for a specified period of time. You are able to modify the number of failed attempts permitted, the period of time over which failed attempts are tallied, and the duration of the lockdown.

WP Greet Box is one way to increase the rate at which visitors return to your site. The plugin shows a different message to your visitors depending on what sent them to your site. For example, you can ask Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and Twitter visitors to follow you on Twitter. More than 20 services are supported out of the box, and you have the ability to add your own services as well.

If you have multiple authors for your blog, and want to give certain authors special permissions, you’ll find that the ability to customize user permissions in WordPress is limited. As noted in the WordPress Codex, WordPress "comes delivered ‘standard’ with five pre-defined Roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. Each Role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities." These capabilities are predefined, and can’t be changed. This plugin allows you to change the capabilities of these standard roles, and also add new ones. For example, you could give a "Contributor" some but not all of the capabilities that an Editor possesses, such as the ability to Publish Posts but not the ability to Publish Pages.

Hello, I'm Evan. I write about tech from my perspective – that of the average tech geek, sometimes with my lawyer glasses on. You can also find me on Twitter and at my real-life job as a lawyer. MORE ABOUT ME.

Another one that I forgot (and hadn’t rated in the earlier article, because I hadn’t found it yet) is “different posts per page”. This allows you to show a differening number of articles for the main page, search results, tag page, etc. I show 4 full articles on my main page, but I show as many as 10 excerpts on my other pages.

Ah, I like that one Kosmo, thanks! I had used it on my personal site for a while, to just put the most recent post, and nothing else, on my front page. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in this site, I forget to see what I’m using on a couple of other non-public WordPress sites I have.

I really like the WP Greet Box idea. About the Role Manager, I’m looking for a plugin that allows author to have a “profile page”, they can costumize with they data and a list of their posts. a bit like you did with the pages but in an automatic way.

I have a kind of advanced animation videoblog website at http://www.wowtion.com/ that will have even more “video related features”. and would love to have this kind of feature were we can have a studio os artist profile page. Do you know any?
.-= Octávio Sá´s last blog ..Pixar – Lifted =-.

You can easily link to all posts by a specific author by simply adding this PHP code to the WordPress template:

In order to add author page like Evan has, you could have each person create their own page with a page title that corresponds to their username and then contruct the URL automatically by appending the username to a base URL.

Yes, I stumbled upon this a while back, figuring WordPress had to have something like it built in. I found that if, for example, you go to http://www.40tech.com/author/evan-kline/ . Obviously, you would need to plug in your site name, and replace my name with the author’s name, but WordPress will then automatically display a list of that author’s posts.

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